Nick Rey

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This Saturday you and thousands of others will roll out of bed, chug a couple shots of espresso, and gather to collectively face the October LSAT. To give yourself the best chance at scoring well (surpassing even your best PEs), it’s essential that you show up informed and properly prepared. This will help you minimize stress on game day, letting you slip into the zone and allow your training to take over.

The most important thing you can do at this point is to make sure you have everything you need already assembled and ready to go. The LSAC has some strange requirements, and if you’re not aware of them, you may not even be able to enter the testing center. Here’s what you absolutely must bring:

Since the Super Bowl way back in February, most Americans have been eagerly awaiting weekends filled with high-flying, hard-hitting football action.

As you might have discovered, college and pro football have been doing their best to distract you from studying for the LSAT. Whether it’s Thursday and Monday night or all day Saturday and Sunday, it almost seems like the NCAA and NFL are trying to take over your life. Add a looming LSAT date into the mix and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

With so much riding on this test, it’s of utmost importance that you handle your football consumption with care — especially during this final week of studying for the LSAT. It’s easy to lose an entire day in a daze of football frenzy, much less an entire weekend.

Most LSAT students have a love/hate relationship with the analytical reasoning section (aka logic games). When things click, analytical reasoning can be surprisingly enjoyable. When they don’t, it can be immensely frustrating. Some students come to love games so much that they’ll sacrifice study time from other fun sections, like reading comp.

Analytical reasoning most often becomes a frustrating affair when students neglect to take time upfront to get a grasp of the game and the rules. Rushing the setup to get to the questions quicker is a surefire way to actually lose time because you’ll constantly be checking your answer.

Sure, as the creators and administrators of the LSAT they are the ones responsible for all your woes with multi-colored dinosaurs, clowns exiting cars, and Thurgood Marshall – but the LSAC is much more than an organization with a mission statement that includes irritating pre-law students the world over. The LSAC is actually here to help, and in ways you may not have realized.

Believe it or not, but the LSAC wants you to do well on the LSAT. At least that’s how I’m interpreting their providing free prep materials on their site. LSAC prep materials are a nice supplement to Blueprint methods and include an overview of each section, general suggestions for each, and sample questions with in-depth explanations.

Last week, our LSAT practice quiz dealt with logic games. Stepping up to the plate for LSAT practice this week: Logical reasoning.

LR is the most consistent section from test to test and makes up 50 percent of your LSAT score. Thus, your LSAT practice should focus largely on mastering this section. The majority of the questions revolve around only a few concepts – arguments, validity and fallacies. If you can master these concepts during LSAT practice, proficiency with most question types will follow.

Below are a couple of original LR questions. Some do not have answer choices. This is to force you to anticipate – just another form of LSAT practice.

By now you’ve been introduced to most of the LSAT game types (including ordering games and grouping games), and you should be getting comfortable with the various rules. To test your skills, I’ve created two original games with some complex interactions. You’ll notice some of the questions don’t have answer choices – that’s to force you to anticipate and properly identify the deductions rather than plugging and chugging through the answer choices. Good luck.

You have eight bottles of alcohol in your cabinet: Absinthe, Bourbon, Cristal, Dewar’s, Ethanol, Gin, Hennessey, and Jaeger, and as a thrifty consumer you always pregame before going out to the bars. Having just finished a practice exam, you estimate five shots would be a nice start to the evening. But you’re not sure which to take. Thankfully, you have your LSAT skills to assist you in your selection, which must conform to the following restrictions:

Perhaps the best thing about the LSAT (besides, of course, for the fact that a good score can redeem four years of drunken revelry in college, never once stepping foot in a library, and attending more football games and frat parties in a semester than actual classes) is that studying for it (properly, that is) will transform you from a gullible believer of all manner of fanciful claims, into a fallacy-finding machine. Once you learn what makes an argument valid (remember the force, Luke) and the common ways an argument can go wrong (you have reviewed lesson 6 right? Good. Now do it again. Yes, it’s that important), you start finding flaws everywhere – much to your friends’ dismay. Don’t think of the logical skills you acquire in LSAT study as applying solely to the narrow realm of the LSAT; you encounter countless arguments in everyday life, many of which are horribly flawed. You just don’t realize it yet.